Arthur Phillip: Commodore of the Fleet

The transportation of convicts to New South Wales in the early years of settlement was a great deal more challenging than has generally been recognised. Arthur Phillip's success in bringing a convoy of eleven ships, including six transports carrying more than 750 convicts, on a voyage of eight months duration across the globe means we need to rethink his contribution to fitting out and managing Australia's First Fleet.

Phillip's Table: Food in the early Sydney settlement

Using food as a lens, this essay looks at what we can discover about Sydney's early settlement from a gastronomic perspective, and what Phillip's table reveals about life at Government House. With few explicit or descriptive references to meals at Government House or in Phillip's company, there are myriad clues in extant journals and information in primary sources about the food available to the colonists and the cross-cultural exchanges involving food between indigenous Australians and settlers.

Table of Contents: The first governor – A bicentenary symposium on Arthur Phillip.

The first governor – A bicentenary symposium on Arthur Phillip. A selection of papers presented to commemorate the bicentenary of Arthur Phillip's death at Sydney Living Museums.

A Diminutive Enigma: New perspectives on Arthur Phillip, first Governor of New South Wales

A sardonic and private man, Arthur Phillip has always been an enigma. His private papers were mostly dispersed and lost, his origins were covered in obscurity and misinformation and few personal descriptions have survived. This essay examines the available information to consider Phillip's personal life and rumours about his death.

Phillip and the Eora: Governing race relations in the colony of New South Wales

What was Governor Arthur Phillip's relationship with the Eora, and other Aboriginal people of the Sydney region? How do we interpret Philip in the light of his actions towards Aboriginal people? Looking at the colony's early years through the twin lenses of British and Eora perspective and experience banishes the notion that there can be only one 'right' story or way of interpreting Phillip's legacy.

The first Government House

The first Government House was not a simple singular structure but a complex with a yard, outbuildings, guardhouse, garden and great domain. It was a home, and office and a venue for public and private entertaining, but also a symbol of British authority, with all that that meant to different people, both then and now. A place of intimacy and officaldom, birth and death, celebration, confrontation and reconciliation, the first Government House was the scene of significant moments in the young colony's history.

Seeking Sydney From the Ground Up: Foundations and Horizons in Sydney’s Historiography

It was an essay by geographers Robyn Dowling and Kathy Mee on Western Sydney public housing estates in the 1950s and 1960s which prompted me to write that we need histories ‘from the ground up’. Dowling and Mee compared longstanding stereotypes of Western Sydney and public housing estates with real demographic profiles and the lived experiences of suburban people, stories that ‘highlight the social promise and ordinariness embedded in the building of estates’. Here was recognizable, human Sydney, full of ‘people doing things’, recovered from the condescension of almost everybody. In this article I want to first explore what ‘from the ground up’ has meant in my own work, and look at its implications for urban history more generally. Then I will trace some key movements and breakthroughs in Sydney’s urban historiography over the past half century, noting particularly what happens when close-grained research is fused with larger conceptual and theoretical approaches and models. My own approach to urban history ‘from the ground up’ is urban ethnographic history. The aim is Annales-inspired histoire total, for I seek to ‘see things whole, to integrate the economic, the social, the political and the cultural into a “total” history’. The Annales emphasis on space, and the perception, co-existence and interaction of different historical timescales, have of course been germane to the emergence of urban history since the 1960s, while cross-disciplinary exchange and thinking (something in which we bowerbird historians excel!) also lies at the heart of urban studies.

Lesbian Spaces: Sydney, 1945-1978

Asking ‘What is lesbian Sydney?’ and ‘Where is it?’, this article traces the shifting spaces and places of lesbian Sydney in the first decades after the Second World War. In the 1940s and 1950s, when camp bars were overwhelmingly male, lesbians enjoyed a very limited public presence in the city. Many women created lesbian spaces in isolation from a wider community, discreetly setting up house with a female partner and gradually building up a small network of lesbian friends. Groups of women met in each other’s homes or visited the parks and beaches around Sydney and the Central Coast for social excursions. By the 1960s, lesbians were beginning to carve out a more visible public space for themselves at wine bars and cabaret clubs in inner suburbs such as Kings Cross, Oxford Street and the city, and the commercial bar scene grew steadily through the 1970s. However, the influence of feminist and lesbian and gay politics in the 1970s also prompted a rethinking of lesbian spaces in Sydney, with well-known lesbian collective houses challenging older notions of private space and political venues such as Women’s House and CAMP NSW headquarters constituting new bases for lesbian community.

World City?

When I began to study Australian history the idea that there was anything worth saying about our cities, in a theoretical sense, was only just beginning to gain traction. There were works of what is called ‘local history’ about particular places, but back then a theorised study of the urban condition did not loom large in Australian historiography. Certainly in my undergraduate years in the 1960s the debates and flash points in Australian history did not include any conscious focus on cities as discrete sites of discourse.

The Sydney History Group: From the Beginning

Formally speaking, the Sydney History Group (SHG) began in 1977, and ran for almost 20 years to 1995, when the last of its seven books appeared.1 The books all presented original research on aspects of Sydney history and were edited by members of the Group, all whom are here today except for first president, the Warrnambool-born economic historian and urbanist Max Kelly.2 His MA on the history of Paddington, later published as A Paddock Full of Houses in 1978, set a new standard in suburban history and whose outline for a history of Sydney delivered to an informal interdisciplinary gathering of economic historians in the early seventies was ahead of its time. Max died too soon in 1996.